There's a great little feature in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions of the word-processing program that lets you export to PowerPoint an outline of any Word file formatted with headings. I admit that it's a specialized operation that probably doesn't get used all that often, but it's a handy way to work between the two Office apps.

I was all set to tell you how to use the feature in Word 2007 when I realized it has been removed. So all that noise Microsoft made when the new Office System was released more than a year ago about how much better the various apps would work together didn't extend to exporting Word outlines to a PowerPoint presentation. Oh, well, I'm sure Microsoft had a good reason for removing the feature.

Here's how it works in Word 2003: First, if you haven't applied headings to the document whose outline you want to export to PowerPoint, open it in Word, select the headings one at a time, and click Format>Styles and Formatting>Heading 1. Each Heading 1 entry will become a separate slide. Now select any subheadings in each Heading 1 section and choose Heading 2. These will be the entries under each Heading 1 slide.

To preview your "presentation," click View>Document Map to open a pane on the left side of the screen. If you like what you see, click File>Send to>Microsoft Office PowerPoint. A new presentation will open in that program with slides representing each of the Heading 1 entries in the original Word file.

A plain-jane PowerPoint presentation is created from the outline of your Word 2003 document.

My attempts to find the same function in Word 2007 came up empty. I tried converting the document to PDF and then importing the PDF version to PowerPoint 2007, but this created so many nonsense slides that it would be easier simply to copy and paste the headings into the various slides. If anybody out there knows how to move the outline of a Word 2007 document to PowerPoint, please let me know.

About the author

Dennis O'Reilly began writing about workplace technology as an editor for Ziff-Davis' Computer Select, back when CDs were new-fangled, and IBM's PC XT was wowing the crowds at Comdex. He spent more than seven years running PC World's award-winning Here's How section, beginning in 2000. O'Reilly has written about everything from web search to PC security to Microsoft Excel customizations. Along with designing, building, and managing several different web sites, Dennis created the Travel Reference Library, a database of travel guidebook reviews that was converted to the web in 1996 and operated through 2000.
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